TOKYO (AFP) — Nissan Motor Co. said Friday that its net profits surged almost 27 percent in the third quarter, snapping a one-year downturn as new model launches boosted demand in a sluggish global economy.

But Nissan, Japan’s third-largest automaker, kept its cautious outlook for the full-year, noting that slowing economic growth and financial market turmoil were keeping a lid on demand in the giant U.S. auto market.
Nissan’s net profit came to 132.22 billion yen (1.24 billion dollars) in the three months to December, marking the first increase in five quarters.
Operating profit rose by 15.8 percent to 211.94 billion yen as revenue grew by 18.2 percent to 2.77 trillion yen, chief executive Carlos Ghosn said.
Nissan’s global sales rose 13 percent in the third quarter to 898,000 vehicles, following the launch of nine models in the first nine months of 2007 including the X-Trail compact sports utility vehicle and the Altima coupe.
Sales rose 5.1 percent in the U.S. and by 12.5 percent in Europe, but fell by 0.9 percent in Japan.
With Japan’s population shrinking, the country’s automakers are relying increasingly on overseas markets to power their growth.
With the sub-prime loan crisis weighing on the U.S. auto market, emerging economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China are becoming ever more important for Nissan and its rivals.
It was a much better performance by Nissan in the third quarter than in the first half of the fiscal year, when net profits had slumped by 22.5 percent due to higher taxes and weak domestic sales.
The weak first-half performance was a drag on nine-month net profits, which fell 9.0 percent to 344.64 billion yen.
Operating profit rose 8.9 percent to 579.08 billion yen in the first three quarters of the fiscal year as revenue increased by 13.9 percent to 7.83 trillion yen.
Nissan kept its forecast for an annual net profit of 480 billion yen, up 4.2 percent from the previous year, when it reported the first drop in profits under its onetime savior Ghosn, who now heads both Nissan and Renault.
Nissan, which was overtaken by Honda in 2006 in terms of sales, sees a 3.0 percent rise in operating profit in the current fiscal year to March to 800 billion yen and a 1.6 percent drop in revenue to 10.3 trillion yen.